The Missing Chess Piece
by Dinogeek
Summary: Sherlock Holmes doesn't usually investigate hauntings. But when a man comes to him asking to know what's going on in his old house, Sherlock finds himself drawn into a case that takes him far back into the past and deep into a heartbreaking story, until at last he solves a mystery three hundred and fifty years in the making. One-shot.


**A/N: This story kinda came out of nowhere, but there's some truth behind it. When my dad was stationed in England my parents lived in this house called Stony Cottage and they always swore up and down it was haunted. Everything I mention in here is something I heard directly from them, but the whole historical story I completely bullshitted. So the history part is fake and the ghost part is (probably) real. You guys have fun with that... Oh, and as usual, reviews are very much appreciated and will be answered.  
**

* * *

"I've got a mystery for you, Mr. Holmes. It's three hundred and fifty years old." Their visitor at Baker Street was a tall, thin man who had come through the rain and shaken his umbrella out on their doorstep. Sherlock frowned outwardly, but inside his interest was growing; he leaned against the wall beside the fireplace and steepled his hands under his chin.

"Theft?" he questioned. Their potential client shook his head.

"No, nothing stolen, at least not that we're aware of."

"We?" Sherlock cut him off, angling an eyebrow.

"Oh, my wife and I- it's just us and our four year old son in the family. But of course we don't know too much about the history of the place." The man suddenly seemed to realize that he hadn't introduced himself yet. "Oh, I'm sorry, my name is Jack Stewart. My wife's name is Mary and my son's is Josh." He shook hands with John but Sherlock made no move to copy the gesture, remaining still and turning what little he knew over in his mind.

"If it's not theft than what is it?" Jack jumped and returned to the matter at hand.

"It's the house," he answered simply. "We've been trying since the day we moved in to figure out what's going on there and it's beyond us, and everyone we've asked."

"What _is_ going on there, then?" John asked curiously.

"Well, to put it bluntly, really weird shit," Jack answered, somewhat wryly. "It's hard to explain. There've been footprints outside the house, going in a circle, and there's no telling where they came from."

"Where did the footprints leading _up_ to the house come from?" Sherlock cut in abruptly.

"There were none," Jack told him. "None leading up to the house and none going away from it; just the set that circled the house, about two or three times."

"Then someone's been pulling a prank on you," Sherlock responded bluntly. "No mystery there."

"I wasn't finished," Jack told him, somewhat reproachfully. "The clocks will reset themselves, we'll leave a room and things will be in a different spot when we get back, Mary put a pin in her pincushion and when she pulled it back out it was curved."

"Not broken?" John asked, surprised. He'd been around those pins before, and they were the opposite of what you'd call flexible. They certainly didn't bend. Jack shook his head.

"No, they weren't broken, they were curved. We've lived in that house for almost five years, since before Josh was born, and no matter what we do we can't find out what's going on there." John laughed.

"It sounds more like you need the Ghostbusters than a detective." Jack laughed as well.

"Well, we finally got tired of it so we figured we'd see what somebody else could find out." He turned to face Sherlock. "I know you like unusual problems, so we decided to ask you. If you want to help, of course. I'm sure you're probably busy." As a matter of fact, they had exactly nothing going right now; they hadn't for days, and John seriously hoped that Sherlock would decide to take the case because otherwise he was in for a fun game of 'hide the gun from the crazy man'. He glanced over at Sherlock, who still hadn't stirred from his position.

"So are you going to take it? It certainly sounds unusual enough and we haven't got any other cases." Sherlock nodded slowly.

"Do you think it's a ghost?" He directed the question at Jack, who looked thoughtful.

"Honestly, I don't know. If there's a logical explanation then it's out of our reach. That's what we came to you for." Sherlock remained still, thinking through the facts. He didn't deal in superstition; he dealt in facts and observations. What he could see, and touch, and hear. Whatever was causing these anomalies, he would find it. And besides, it certainly was an interesting problem, there was no denying that. He pushed off from the wall abruptly.

"I'll take the case. Give us the directions and we'll meet you there tomorrow."

* * *

The house was small, old, and in the middle of nowhere about ten miles off the highway and another five off the country road. As Jack had said, it dated back about three hundred and sixty years to the early-seventeenth century. It was not a large house, no more than large enough for a single family, but it was comfortable. It was whitewashed on the outside with red roof tiles and the window panes made crisscross patterns that glittered when the sun was out.

Jack greeted them in the driveway and pulled the door open with some effort. "Sorry, it sticks a little when it's cold," he apologized. "Mary and Josh are home already. I've told them you're coming." The house was a fair ways away from London so while they were seeking the source of the mystery occurrences the Stewarts had allowed them to stay in the spare room.

"It's a beautiful house," John told him. A blonde woman came into the hallway and smiled at them.

"Yes, it is, isn't it? Much more interesting than one of those modern places." She held out her hand. "I'm Mary Stewart, Jack's wife. He told me you'd be staying so I've made up the spare room for you. I'm afraid there's only one bed, though." John just shrugged. He was long past the point of bothering to try and correct people when they thought he and Sherlock were a couple. He'd never have been able to carry on a real conversation.

"It's fine," he told her. "Uh, well, I don't know what Sherlock wants to start with…" His voice trailed off as he turned to the detective, who was still gazing at the exterior of the house and seemed to have gone into radio silence. He turned back to the Stewarts and rolled his eyes. "He'll come inside when he's ready."

Mary showed him to the spare room and he dumped his bag at the foot of the bed when a small red-haired boy ran in, chasing after a toy car that had rolled through the doorway. He stopped when he saw John, car all but forgotten. "Hello."

"Hello to you too," John replied. "You must be Josh." The little boy nodded.

"Are you the detectives? Mum and Dad told me you were coming to find out why all the weird things are happening. Have you found out yet?" Sherlock took up the conversation as he swept into the room behind Josh, much to John's chagrin.

"No, we haven't even started. What do you think?" John was surprised- Sherlock didn't usually go in for asking other people's opinions. But then he remembered that Sherlock preferred to interview kids over adults. According to him they were more honest and less likely to bias their opinions.

"I think it's a ghost," Josh reported dutifully. Sherlock scowled slightly but stopped quickly at the look that John delivered to him. "A lady ghost, because she's nice. She's not scary or anything, we just want to know what happened to her." Josh skittered off out the door with his car in his hand and John raised his eyebrows.

"Well he certainly seems convinced."

"He's four years old, John; that's not exactly the height of logic," Sherlock retorted, knowing that John was poking fun at him.

"Oh really? So what are you going to do if you can't find a logical explanation for it?" John was partly making fun of him and partly genuinely interested. "You may not, you know."

"Lack of a logical explanation doesn't mean there isn't one; it just means that we haven't found it." John nodded, conceding the point. He and Sherlock headed to the kitchen for dinner when they saw Mary come past them, looking moderately irritated.

"What's wrong?" John asked her. She shook her head in exasperation.

"Jack keeps moving the knife block to the other side of the sink and not telling me. I'm just going to ask him why. Have you seen him?" They shook their heads.

"Not since we got here," John answered.

"He must be in the bedroom," Mary said to herself, heading for the stairs when the front door opened and Jack reentered the house. "Jack, why have you been moving the knives?" He looked confused.

"What? I haven't been doing anything to the knives."

"Well what have you been doing?" He held up a can of grease.

"I was working on the door hinges to see if I could get them to unstick. I haven't been inside for a good fifteen minutes. And I know better than to touch kitchen stuff without asking you first." He smiled wryly. Mary still looked slightly skeptical, like she wasn't entirely sure that her husband wasn't just pulling a prank on her.

"Well who _did_ move it, then?" she asked in exasperation. "It wasn't you, it wasn't me, and Josh can't reach up that far yet."

"It wasn't either of us," John filled in. "We were talking to Josh just a minute ago, asking him about the case. Are you sure you didn't just put it on that one side and then not remember that you moved it?" Mary shook her head vehemently.

"No, I absolutely didn't; I'd just gotten that knife block at the store yesterday and I was putting it in its spot."

"Which side did you put it on?" Sherlock cut in abruptly.

"I put on the left side," Mary answered, "and then I left the kitchen to get the laundry out and when I got back it was on the right. I replaced it and left again to put a new laundry pile in, got back, and it had done the same. After that I deliberately left just to see what would happen, and when I came back in, it was over on the right side again. I might as well just leave it there now…"

"Did you move it back to the left side?" She nodded.

"I decided to try one last time; I haven't checked it yet, though." Without another word, Sherlock strode into the kitchen, where lo and behold a brand new knife block sat on the right side next to the kitchen sink. "I'm just going to leave it," Mary remarked. "Obviously somebody wants it to be there." A few minutes later she, Jack, Josh, and they had settled around the table to eat. Sherlock remained steadfastly silent throughout the meal, lost in thought.

"So what were you thinking so deeply about, then?" he asked the detective after dinner was over. "Trying to find an explanation for the knife block?" Sherlock was still buried deep in thought (or deliberately ignoring him) and didn't answer, simply perching on the edge of the bed in a position John knew he would maintain probably until morning.

The next morning, as John had predicted, he arose to find Sherlock in the exact same spot he'd been in the previous night. "I can't think of anything, John," he commented, not even looking at the doctor.

"Just keep working on it, I'm sure you'll find an idea. Or it really could be a ghost." John smiled. Sherlock finally twitched enough to shoot John a glare.

"Don't be foolish, John. Come on, let's go look around a bit more. I want to see the walls." Sherlock had been up the whole night and John had arisen particularly early, so they were the only ones in the house awake for a while. They looked from end to end and found nothing unusual, and by the time they headed back to their room to get their coats, Mary and Jack had gotten up as well. Mary went over to the sitting room window and threw back the curtain to let in what little light would come through the window on the cloudy day.

"Jack, come here," she called out. "The footsteps are back again." All three men hurried over to the window where sure enough there was a neat line of footsteps circling the house two times.

"I'll go look at them." Sherlock threw on his coat and swept out the door, examining the footprints carefully. As Jack had told them the two days prior, there was no sign whatsoever of any prints coming or going; the snow was clean and untouched, a fresh three inches having fallen overnight.

Sherlock circled the cottage, expert eyes looking for any sign of the maker and finding none. He was not a superstitious man; he didn't believe in ghosts or the paranormal or anything like that. But he had to admit that right now he was running out of options. The only way someone could have made these prints was by jumping from the house into the snow and back up again without leaving a trace of their passing.

But the clincher of the matter happened that evening, when Sherlock had convinced John to submit to a game of chess with him that the doctor knew he had absolutely no hope of winning. John was about to lose tremendously when Josh, wandering by, decided to examine one of Sherlock's knights. He stood up to his full four year old height, reached his hand up for the chess piece, and slipped it off the table before Sherlock could stop him.

The heavy brass chess piece hit the ground with a resounding thunk, and Mary called across the room, "Joshua, you pick that up and give it back to Mr. Holmes _right now_."

"Okay mum," he called back, head down. "I'm sorry."

"It's fine," Sherlock told him, "I remember where it goes." Josh bent down and searched the floor.

"I can't find it, mum," he called out. Mary sighed and got up, joining the abashed child. "I looked all over, but it's not anywhere."

"You must have just missed it, honey," Mary told him, crouching down to look for the knight. She looked for a couple of minutes before her face grew confused. "That's odd," she muttered.

"What is?" John asked, joining them in search for the errant piece.

"It really _isn't_ anywhere," Mary replied. "I heard it hit the floor, didn't you?" John nodded in affirmation. "But it's not on the floor. There's no rug it could be hiding in, and it can't have rolled under any of the furniture because it can't roll at _all_. Where on earth could it have gone?" By this time Sherlock had joined them in their thorough examination of the floor, but even his eagle eyes turned up nothing. The solid brass chess piece had hit the ground and vanished into thin air.

Eventually, after lifting every rug and shifting every piece of furniture in the sitting room, all four of them had to concede that the knight was quite simply gone. Unless it had fallen through an invisible hole in the floor and into the basement, they had no idea where it was.

The next day, Sherlock drove into town and went to the library, searching through the archives. They were housed in the back of the library in a musty room that made you feel like you really had gone back in time. Birth records and death records he set to the side, looking specifically for the land records.

The cottage had been built in 1620 by Howard Teese, a blacksmith, and his wife Lillian. There was no more information listed on that sheet, so Sherlock turned to the birth records, turning the pages in his latex-gloved hands. Howard and Lillian had given birth to three children, all sons- Jacob, Joseph, and Michael.

After that, he paged through the death records, revealing some unusual information. Howard, it seemed, had lived to an old age, but Lillian was registered as having died in 1643, with the cause listed simply as 'Injury'. The register went on to record that she had been buried in the village cemetery and, later in the years, her husband next to her.

Deaths from injury weren't uncommon, especially back in those days when everything was more dangerous by default. But still, something tugged at Sherlock's gut, telling him to keep finding the story. So he did, searching late into the day, until the library closed and he was forced to leave empty-handed.

"Do you want to see something odd?" Jack asked him when he got back. "I realized I'd forgotten to mention it before; it's the fireplace." There were two fireplaces in the house, both of them original to the building. They'd had the one in the sitting room lit last night during the missing chess piece escapade. The other one sat directly opposite it, in a different room of the house.

As Sherlock watched, Jack lit a piece of paper on fire, waiting until it was really burning, and then tossed it into the grate, where it went out cold. "It does that every time," he remarked. "You can put something in there and it won't light, and if you take it out and light it it'll go out when you put it in there. We've never been able to burn anything in this fireplace." He laughed.

"I once put charcoal in there on top of the wood, doused it with accelerant and piled newspaper on top of it; tossed a match in there and nothing happened. The match burned out sitting in a puddle of flame accelerant."

Now that _was_ odd… Even Sherlock, with his supremely logical mind, couldn't explain what was happening in this cottage. Turning it over in his mind, he zoomed straight back to the library archives the next morning and resumed his position. Finished with the records, he turned his gaze to the history of the era- and it had been a messy one.

Civil Wars and revolutions and trading kingships abounded, but he focused on 1643, the year Lillian had died of her injury. The previous year the English Civil War had broken out, leading to the conscription of all able-bodied adult men; that conscription, he found, had included both Howard and all three of his and Lillian's sons. Lillian had been left alone with a house to tend, a husband and three sons off fighting in the war, and a rapidly approaching troop of men from the war's other side.

Between the historical record and various accounts, Sherlock managed to piece together most of the picture, but he didn't have the whole thing until he stumbled across an old, dusty letter that had been overlooked for hundreds of years, most likely. That was when he knew the full story.

* * *

"I know why you're here," Sherlock said quietly to the empty room. He had slipped up there at three in the morning after reading his eyes dry at the library. "Well, it's obvious why you're here; it's your house. You died defending it." He sighed quietly. "I don't know if you're really here- for all I know I could be talking to thin air. But I'm going out on a limb I never usually do."

He shut the door behind him and sat down in front of the fireplace that would not light. "I found the letter the priest wrote about you and your family. You were brave."

That letter had been the thing that tied it all together. After Lillian's family had been conscripted into the army, she had been left alone at her home. Things had gone well for a while, the priest had written, until one day a group of soldiers came across her home, demanding to know who her family was fighting for. She had refused to answer, knowing that she would be put in danger if they knew her family was fighting for the other side's forces, and the soldiers had moved on.

The next day, though, the main force had moved through, ransacking the town for enemy spies or soldiers, and Lillian and her cottage had been one of their targets. The priest wrote that the townspeople had fled to the church for sanctuary, except for Lillian. She had stayed behind to defend her home, and there was more than that- a group of children had been playing in the woods when the soldiers came through and, unable to get to the church, they had gone to Lillian's cottage.

The soldiers had banged on her door, demanding that she open up and allow them to search it for enemies. She refused, and they had laid siege to her house. She rushed the children down into the basement, shutting the door behind her, when they finally got into the house. Knowing that she probably wasn't going to make it anyway, she had grabbed one her husband's blacksmith tools and defended her home, fighting with such ferocity that, the priest had written, the men were so impressed by her bravery that they had left her, and her home, without getting anywhere near the basement or the children inside.

It was too late for Lillian, however; she had been wounded during the fight, and three days later, surrounded by all the people of the village, she died of her wounds inside the house she'd given her life for. She was buried in the village cemetery along with the tool she'd used to fight the soldiers.

Her husband and three sons had survived the war, although Jacob did lose his left arm in battle. Howard and his children had remained in the house where, according to a later record written just before Howard's death, he and his sons had frequently felt as though Lillian were still there with them and watching the house. Lillian and Howard's descendants had lived in the cottage until the early eighteen hundreds, when they moved to London.

"I know the story now," Sherlock finished quietly. "You're still trying to defend your house, aren't you? Still trying to watch over your descendants." He shook his head like a dog trying to rid itself of water. "Well, anyway… I hope you're happy, if you're even real. You deserve to be." He stood to leave, and could have sworn that he felt a hand on his shoulder.

At the door he turned and looked back one last time; the case was done now, and the truth had been revealed. On instinct, he gazed at the fireplace once more.

There was a small, orange flame in it. His face broke out into a rare genuine smile. "Thank you," he said quietly.

The little flame faded out, and Sherlock Holmes shut the door behind him with a feeling of satisfaction.


End file.
